Luckiest Man

From npr.com

One good thing about spending hour after hour in airports and on planes is getting a chance to catch up on my reading list. On the trip to and from the WInter Meetings, I got a chance to start and finish Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig by Jonathon Eig.

I've seen Pride of the Yankees more times than I care to admit and I really like the performance of Gary Cooper. However, I realize that Gehrig's life gets the Hollywood treatment with a few made up stories getting into the narrative.

Sad to say, but I don't think that I have ever read anything more than one of those career sketches in a big book of baseball legends about Gehrig. Not for lack of want, but for the lack of a really good biography of one of players from the 20's and 30's that I have always looked up to as a role model.

This is a really good biography and I learned a few things about this quiet, hard-working man that I didn't know or had forgotten. Here are fifteen interesting things about Gehrig (One for each season that contained his streak of 2,130 consecutive games) that I picked up from Eig's book:

1.) When Gehrig was born, the midwife who signed the birth certificate began to fill in the child's name as Heinrich -- after his German immigrant father. The midwife stopped and through a little creative crossing out named the baby Henry Louis Gehrig.

2.) Gehrig graduated from Commerce High School in New York in January of 1921, enrolled in a Columbia University extension program in February, and started playing for the Columbia baseball team April.

3.) Gehrig got a tryout for the New York Giants and their manager John McGraw later in the spring of 1921. He hit seven home runs in batting practice to start the tryout. However, when he was taking grounder at first, one skipped through his legs and McGraw stopped the tryout. He declined to sign the future legend.

4.) During the summer of 1921, Gehrig played professionally for the Hartford Senators, which almost cost him his eligibility. In fact it should have cost him his scholarship and his eligibility. But, he only lost a year.

5.) The Hartford newspapers aided the Senators and Gehrig in the deception by referring to him by the aliases of Lefty Gehrig and Lew Lewis. Think that would happen today?

6.) In his first round of batting practice with the Yankees, Gehrig grabbed Babe Ruth's bat by mistake and was so afraid of breaking it that he just stood in the cage without swinging. Eig admits that this story has a "hint of that too-good-too-be-true quality". And it's too good to leave out of this post.

7.) In one of his first games with the Yankees in 1924, Gehrig made a base running mistake and wound up being tagged out by Ty Cobb. Cobb insulted Gehrig and Gehrig became so enraged with Cobb that he was eventually ejected from the game. After the game, Gehrig chased after Cobb beneath the stands, threw a punch at Cobb, missed, fell on his head, and knocked himself out.

8.) Gehrig was a horrible negotiator and for most of his career always signed the first contract he was sent. That contract was almost always a lowball fgure from the Yankees because they knew that Gehrig was happy just to have a job.

9.) When Babe Ruth started talking about how bad a job that he thought manager Miller Huggins was doing, Gehrig took his manager's side. The start of the rivalry between the two sluggers.

10.) Gehrig tried out for the role of Tarzan in 1937 and eventually mad a movie called Rawhide. He actually lip-synched a song in the movie.

11.) During a 1934 exhibition game in Norfolk, Gehrig was beaned in the head with a fastball from Ray White. He was knocked out and White actually bragged about ending the streak. Of course, Gehrig played in Washington the next day. He tripled three times, but rain washed out the game and the performance before it became official.

12.) On June 3, 1932, Gehrig hit four home runs in a game against the Philadephia Athletics. The headlines in the New York papers were about the retirment of John McGraw as the manager of the Giants.

13.) Gerhig wasn't much of a drinker. But, he thought that he played so poorly in the 1938 World Series victory over the Cubs that:

Later that night, as the team celebrated at the Commodore Hotel, he started knocking back shots of hard liquor. At one point, he sat astride a chair and pretended to ride a horse, as if he were back on the set of Rawhide.

"You'd better look after Lou," one Yankee whispered to [Gehrig's wife] Eleanor. "He's drinking triples, and he's really bombed."

Gehrig had no way of knowing the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis was already taking over his body.

14.) Gehrig's doctors had him convinced that injections of histamines or a lot of Vitamin E would either cure him or stop ALS in its tracks.

15.) After he died, Eleanor got into a nasty fight with Lou's parents about money. Eleanor's lawyer informed the Gehrig's that since they were still German citizens and with the German Army occupying most of Europe and battling Great Britain, it would be best if they not make any trouble.

There is much more to this fine book and maybe I'll do a bit more on it later on during the Christmas season.

Go to lougehrig.com for on the Iron Horse. Included HERE is the full text of his farewell speech and a few audio clips of the speech.